Must… blog… more…

I recently caused Ubuntu to pout and refuse to boot for some reason. Probably because I messed around with the programs that ran at boot too much, trying to prevent too much stuff from running in the background. Booting into it would hang at a certain point, so I figured it was time to clean out all of the mess I made and reinstall rather than try to mess it up more.

So I’m back in a fresh, new (well, a few days old now) install of Ubuntu and everything’s running fine. Still not booting to a graphic login screen and I am using fluxbox, but other than that, I haven’t really messed with Ubuntu’s inner workings that much. I’m too used to being able to play around with everything like I could do in Gentoo, I guess.

What’s interesting, though, is that when a Linux distro has crapped out on me before, whether or not it was my fault, I tried to find a different distro to run. Staying with Ubuntu through this means that I must really like it.

And I do.

That other OS — no, not that one.

BSD has interested me for quite some time as being the other alternative OS. I have had some difficulties with it in the past, mostly due to my unfamiliarity with it, but also given that BSD has, until lately, been where Linux was in the late 1990s — a very good server OS to those who know it inside out, but much less accessible to newcomers. I do have the advantage of knowing a Unixlike OS well enough from Linux (unlike me coming to Linux, where I didn’t know very much at all). Fortunately, in the Linux world, SuSE Linux began having a very user-friendly environment around version 6, and it is from that OS I learned a lot more about the world of Linux from inside an environment that I didn’t have to do a lot to get everything working.

In BSD, however, most distros still require quite a bit of work to get things up and running for a desktop environment. This is beginning to change, though, especially with the flavor of BSD I tried — PC-BSD. Based on FreeBSD, this OS has a graphical installer, good hardware detection, and booted straight into a well-configured KDE environment with lots of graphical tools to help configure everything. While I didn’t necessarily need all of that, I did find it nice to have it if needed, and it would be great for people with less experience than I.

It contains the two regular FreeBSD package systems — installing binaries via pkg_add, and the Ports system that automates building from source and installing (though Ports is not installed by default, it’s available by issuing a specific command after installation). However, PC-BSD also contains a nice graphical installer through specially packaged files called PBIs, similar to installer EXEs on Windows, that not only install packages, but all of the package’s dependencies, all in a self-contained bundle, so one does not have to worry about resolving package dependencies and conflicting dependencies over different packages. While this works fine most of the time, I did see a few issues with downloaded packages not working correctly or just partially working (Wine — a Windows API layer that runs a few native Windows programs in Linux and BSD — being a particularly bad package, as it did not install all of the utilities normally used, such as winecfg (the configuration GUI) and regedit (the Wine equivalent to the Windows regedit to edit advanced configuration settings in installed programs and Wine itself), and frequently would not even run a program that normally ran in Wine. (Unfortunately, even installing the binary package of Wine using pkg_add created a few unusual problems — it is possible that compiling the latest Wine version from source would have fixed this, but I didn’t go that far, since it does take a while to finish).

The worst thing, however, is that there were a few bugs that crept up. KDE would malfunction occasionally (for example, one of the panels on my desktop suddenly disappeared, and the entire desktop would not start up once), and a couple of times, the system would just shut down for no apparent reason (X would shut down and the system looked like someone had issued a reboot command — I’m not sure if BSD is supposed to behave this way if the kernel crashes or what, but I didn’t find anything in the logs that was unusual). Because of these faults, I really couldn’t recommend it, but at least BSD has come a long way towards being more usable than ever before. Kudos to the creators of PC-BSD for that.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

Flash 9 in Linux… when?

Well, Flash 8/9 is being adopted pretty much everywhere around the ‘net (like MySpace); meanwhile Linux users are stuck back with Flash 7, with a vague promise of a test version of Flash 9 sometime before the end of the year and a final next year sometime.

That stinks.

However, if you don’t mind using Wine, there’s a way to make do until the day they graciously allow us poor Linux users to use the new Holy Grail of Flash 9 (and by then I’m sure Windows will be enjoying Flash 10). Simply install the Windows version of Firefox, then download and install the latest version of Flash for Windows and install it under Wine. Now when you run the Windows version of Firefox via Wine, you should be able to use Flash 9, though since it does run under Wine it isn’t very stable.

It’ll do, though, until we are finally recognized by Adobe as worthy of receiving their gift of Flash.

NTFS Write Support

Apparently there is now full read-write support for NTFS partitions in Linux.  Thanks to a modification to the linux-ntfs development project, full support for writing in a Windows NTFS partition from Linux is now possible without restriction, unlike before where writing was either not supported or very limited.

Well, I had to give this a try; unfortunately, so far the results aren’t as great as I had hoped for.  Writing files into existing directories works fine; however, there is an issue with creating new directories and writing files into them.  Reading and writing the files in the new directory is not a problem under the ntfs-3g driver in Linux; however, when I reboot to Windows and try to access the same files, Windows tells me that the directory I’ve created is corrupt, and doing a repair on the drive removes the directory and all files within. If I leave the corrupted directory alone and go back to Linux, the directory can be read with no problem by the ntfs-3g driver.

So there’s promise there, but still a few bugs to work out before it can be reliably used.  I’ll definately keep my eye on this since flawless interoperativity between a Windows NTFS drive and Linux on the same system is definately something that has been a long time coming.

Genesis/Megadrive Emulation in Linux

One of my biggest interests is computer and video gaming. Linux, however, does not offer the wide range of gaming options provided by “that other OS”, but Linux does provide quite a few options, including several gaming emulators for classic consoles. The Genesis/Megadrive (I’ll just refer to it by its name in the USA — “Genesis” — from now on for simplicity’s sake) is one of those, and while most distros have a commandline-only Genesis emulator (dgen), it does lack a bit in features and quality.

There is another Genesis emulator for Linux from the Windows world, called Gens; its problem, however, is that it is very slow due to it running in software mode and not using any kind of hardware acceleration to render it onto the screen. Fortunately, someone posted on the Gentoo forums here a version of Gens that uses hardware acceleration. The link provided at the beginning no longer works, since there has been an updated version (posted on page 3 of that discussion) available here (or at a mirror someone provided here ). As long as you have the proper development libraries installed, compiling should be very simple (though there may be some issues with GCC4; most distros have a way to install a 3.4 version of GCC; to build with it, use export CC=”gcc-3.4″ and export CXX=”g++-3.4″ before configuring).

The only problem I had with the default install is that Gens would not remember the last directory you opened a ROM from; I created a small patch that would do exactly that. It is available from my site here (backup site here).

Happy gaming!